Beamforming in a Wi-Fi network occurs during wireless data transfers between transmitters (i.e., a beamformer) and receivers (i.e., a beamformee) such as access points and stations. More specifically, rather than broadcasting an omnidirectional signal to a wide area to reach a target, beamforming concentrates the signal directly at the target that is faster, stronger, and has a longer range, with improved SNR. Beamforming is enabled by transmitters and/or receivers that use MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) technology in achieving spatial selectivity. Data is sent using multiple antennas to increase throughput and range with propagation over multiple paths. More specifically, one example of beamforming combines elements in an antenna array in such a way that signals at particular angles experience constructive interference while others experience destructive interference. Directivity of the antenna array describes the improvement over the omnidirectional technique.
Newer standards such as IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11ac wave 2 provide particular protocols for beamforming as to how transmitters and receivers communicate with each other and provide information about their relative positions. This will increase the number of beamforming enabled products brought to market.
A drawback of IEEE 802.11ac is the station-centric design with respect to control of connecting to a network, and use while on the network. As a result, an imbalance of IEEE 802.11ac stations, requiring boundless beamforming without can damage overall hardware and network performance. Beamforming is processor intensive and the overhead of location processing in the processor pipeline slows down other operations also utilizing a network processor or software process. For example, an access point continuously implements hand-shaking with all beamforming stations in order to identify their respective directions. Consequentially, efficiency of the access point is reduced and air-traffic increases.
Even newer standards such as IEEE 802.11ad provides for two-way beamforming due to 5 mm wavelength technology. Smaller antenna will bring small form factor two-way beamforming capability to smartphones, laptops, and other mobile devices. Once again, unfortunately, stations inherently control 2-way beamforming and may consume undue resources on the network.
Beamforming has limited support in standards preceding IEEE 802.11ac, such as IEEE 802.11n which technically supports beamforming capability, but without any specific direction on how it is to be implemented. Consequently, a router or access point may not be compatible with a station having a different implementation and no location information is available for implementing beamforming capability. These conditions curtail the use of beamforming for IEEE 802.11n-capable devices that have not been upgraded to IEEE 802.11ac capability.
Therefore, what is needed is a robust technique to add a network control to beamforming by centrally controlling locationing for beamforming Wi-Fi transmissions to wireless stations from access points, independent of beamforming capability of stations. The access points devices and network performance also needs to be improved.